Comment by mkn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkn | Hacker News Reader

This research immediately reminded my of Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness, which is a wonderful read. The book details many of the myriad ways in which we fail at predicting the affective result of various outcomes. For example, people will predict that they'll feel just awful for months after an election if the opposing candidate wins, yet report no change in happiness in as little as a month after their candidate loses. Amazing stuff.

Another salient point is that we almost never take into account the fact that we accommodate to the conditions around us. We truly believe that if we win the lottery we will be happy forever, even in the face of mountains of data to the contrary.

The most surprising result, I thought, was that (in the late 1990s U.S. dollars) happiness begins at $40k per year, and increases only slightly for incomes up to $100k per year, and then is essentially flat. One of the drivers for this was that, at $40k per year, you typically get health insurance through work, and this removes the primary worry that brings people's happiness down.

I think the really interesting thing would be to see if you could convince rich people of this so that they voluntarily, without legal compulsion, would give up some of their wealth to make others happy. I'd be interested to see if I would do this, if I ever became a .com/web 2.0 zillionaire.

The problem is that most people spend the money they have, expecting more possessions to improve their subjective well-being.

There are some exceptions to the "money doesn't buy you happiness" rule, my favorite of which are: - Spending a lot of money on loved ones or favored charities does tend to make people happier - Having a lot of savings makes people more apt to handle negative shocks

It is, however, extremely difficult to resist the temptation to spend excess cash even if you know of and believe the research that it doesn't make you feel any better.

The real problem: asking people "are you happy?" isn't a good metric of their well-being. The answer you get is determined mostly by (a) their personality and (b) what's happened in their lives over the past few days (whether good or bad).

But that isn't the same as saying that there are no differences in well-being throughout someone's life. If I lose both my legs tomorrow I'll probably feel bad for a while but after a couple of years learn to cope with my new situation and return to my baseline level of happiness. That doesn't mean that chopping off my legs is essentially a cost-free exercise to me though.

Any populist arguments completely fail to take into account the sheer volume of poor people. Even if you had a 100% tax on all income over 50k a year and a 100% tax on all corporate profits over 50k a year per employee, you wouldn't have enough money to give everyone a middle class lifestyle.

and that is if we don't even take into account the extreme inflationary forces that would take hold if everyone made middle class money. If you tried this in reality all that would happen is that prices would rise until that middle class income reflected the buying power that a lower class income previously did.

You can't magic a high standard of living into existence by giving away money (see Iceland). To think that you can is a fundamental misunderstanding of what money is. Steve Jobs doesn't make millions of dollars because he got lucky in an unfair game with arbitrary rules. He makes it because he creates millions of dollars in value to people.

> you wouldn't have enough money to give everyone a middle class lifestyle.

What's a "middle class lifestyle"?

I ask because poor people in the US have a lot of things that might be considered luxury items in other places, such as TVs, microwaves, cars, and so on. (One of my favorite examples is someone who ranted "I'm homeless. Me and my five children have to share a two bedroom apartment.")

Further info: an article listing the goods and services the poor tend to have access to. Not bad at all.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm

exactly, by all reasonable metrics we already have achieved the ideal of a baseline below which people can't fall. the cries of more aid for the poor when the aid already given is distributed inefficiently and unfairly seems disingenuous at best and power seeking at worst.

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